Treme

This article makes a case for the academic soundness of reading together several television shows by the same showrunner. Zeroing in on the case of David Simon, the essay traces the difficulties that one faces if one aims to view together The Corner, The Wire, Generation Kill, Treme, Show Me a Hero and The Deuce. It also aims to point out the reason how one can study an oeuvre without overemphasizing the agency of the individual in a highly collaborative medium. To that end, the article considers how intellectual historian Quentin Skinner's concept " the mythology of coherence " can help qualify some of the issues with reading several television series together. The article further argues that television scholar Erlend Lavik's term " focused overarching authorship " supports the validity in trying to tease out a collected vision in Simon's television serials. For while David Simon is a sine qua non for the programs he has served as the showrunner on, the paper argues that it is crucial that we do not let all textual components point back to Simon as the originator of the textual utterance.

The character of Creighton Bernette on the HBO series Treme, in his excesses and abjection, embodies post-Katrina New Orleans in crucial ways: physical and emotional excesses become ways to distance his character from viewers, in ways analogous to the othering of the city and its inhabitants in post-Katrina media and public discourses.

Within the rapidly evolving field of modern television, one of the issues which demand to be thoroughly analyzed is the matter of authorship. In the post-network era, the figure of a showrunner emerged as American television’s answer to cinema’s auteur. Since HBO’s The Sopranos started the New Golden Age of TV, writer-producers such as Alan Ball and David Simon captivated the imagination of audiences and critics alike, with the last showrunner being famously compared to Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy and William Shakespeare. The aim of this article is to analyze one-page posters and ascertain how evident the concept of “showrunner as an auteur” is in said promotional materials. The article does not focus on the content of advertised shows, but rather tries to determine whether the artworks reflect the auteurist status of The Wire’s showrunner, David Simon. The case study of posters for television shows runned by David Simon demonstrates a rise of his supposed popularity and recognizability. Operating on the assumption that poster credits are not only a part of contractually-bound transaction between the network and talent, but also function as one of the elements that attract prospective viewers, one can conclude that David Simon’s auteurist brand, as recognized by HBO’s publicity department, grew more prominent throughout the years.

Forthcoming December 2014. The term “urban ecology”  has become a buzzword in various disciplines, including the social and natural sciences as well as urban planning and architecture. The environmental humanities, however, have been slow to adapt to current theoretical debates, often excluding human-built environments from their respective frameworks. The aim of this book is therefore to close this gap both in theory as well as in practice, bringing together “urban ecology” with ecocritical approaches by conceptualizing the city as an integral part of the environment and as a space in which ecological problems become manifest concretely. Combining the approaches of urban ecology, material ecocriticism and cultural ecology, the study argues  that culture has to be seen as an active component and integral factor within urban ecologies. It makes use of a metaphorical use of the term, perceiving cities as spatial phenomena that do not only have manifold and complex material interrelations with their respective (natural) environments, but that are intrinsically connected to the ideas, imaginations, and interpretations that make up the cultural symbolic and discursive side of our urban lives and that are stored and constantly renegotiated in their cultural and artistic representations. The city is, within this framework, both seen as an ecosystemically organized space as well as a cultural artifact. Thus, the urban ecology outlined in this study takes its main impetus from an analysis of examples taken from contemporary culture - from non-fictional urban writing to tv series/documentaries and films - that deal with urban life and the complex interrelations between urban communities and their (natural and built) environments.

Blurbs:
“In thinking together urban environments, their cultural representations, and a great number of current theoretical notions, from ecocriticism to the new materialism, Schliephake's book develops an approach of 'cultural urban ecology’ which broadens the perspective of the fields of cultural ecology and cultural urban studies alike, and makes this book a must-read for everyone interested in ecocritical approaches to the city and the environmental humanities in general.”—Roman Bartosch, University of Cologne

“This highly innovative study explores new terrain in the fields of Ecocriticism and the Environmental Humanities by combining the approaches of Material Ecocriticism, Cultural Ecology, and Urban Ecology into a complex framework of interdisciplinary inquiry. The book renders important new insights into the emerging field of a cultural urban ecology as reflected in a broad spectrum of textual and cultural media between realist and imaginative modes.”—Hubert Zapf, University of Augsburg

“This timely study combines insights from ecology, geography, and cultural studies to develop an environmental perspective on the city. Instead of pining for elusive country idylls, it asks how we can understand and improve the places in which most of us actually live. Urban Ecologies: City Space, Material Agency, and Environmental Politics in Contemporary Culture is required reading for environmentalists across the disciplines, and it will be of great interest to anyone thinking about cities today—including fans of Treme and The Wire.”—Timo Müller, University of Augsburg

“Urban Ecologies is ecocritical cultural studies at its finest with a welcome focus on urban ecology. Schliephake masterfully develops his argument through studies of nonfiction reportage, The Wire and Treme television series, documentary films, and cinema, with an especially clear exposition of how so-called ‘natural’ events are rarely natural, but rather technological disasters.”—Patrick Murphy, author of Transversal Ecocritical Praxis

David Simon regularly says that the origins of The Wire can be traced to Greek tragedy. My contention here is that Simon's engagement with Greek literature persists in his New Orleans drama, Treme. For instance, through the story of LaDonna Batiste-Williams, a woman desperately trying to locate and bury the body of her brother, Simon reimagines and adapts Sophocles' Antigone for a twenty-first-century urban context. Both Sophocles and Simon use the image of the unburied corpse to demonstrate the injustices of ancient tyrannies and modern capitalist bureaucracies, respectively. However, Treme also depicts (and perhaps even models) alternative modes of being, ways of life organized around art and beauty. This article contends that these alternative ways of life are offered as potential antidotes to the political absurdities of post-Katrina New Orleans.

Despite being seen as cutting edge, critical television, HBO's Treme represents and enacts reformist rather than radical politics. The series positions networks as a means through which citizens gain “voice and visibility” within a participatory “civil society” predicated on democratic ideals--activism rooted in a liberal theory of politics that equates being “made visible” with being politically recognized and represented. Arguably, such liberal theory has been discredited by redevelopment in New Orleans after Katrina. This chapter considers how David Simon's Treme is structurally and narratively situated within these tensions. Although the series mediates reformist ideals related to the power of networks to bring about social change, the series powerfully highlights the transformative power of participatory journalism, and in doing so, sidesteps usual strains of technological determinism inherent to media representations of network power. Ultimately, though, the series reifies (or brings in to being) liberal, reformist ideals of network power within the field of televisual fiction.

Quoi que Treme, le nouveau projet de Simon et Overmyer pour HBO, n’ait pas encore été diffusée dans son intégralité, un motif récurrent apparaît, celui de la reprise. Il y a bien sûr la rénovation de La Nouvelle-Orléans après le passage de l’ouragan Katrina et de
l’inondation qui lui fit suite, mais aussi la reconstruction de la culture locale, et celle des personnages. D’une manière ou d’une autre, ceux-ci sont tous engagés dans un processus de reconstruction, après des destructions de l’intime, du matériel, ou de l’immatériel. Cet article questionne la manière dont la série travaille le motif de la reprise, entendue comme répétition altérée d’un existant, aussi bien dans la vie des personnages que dans sa poétique même. Sur les onze épisodes de la saison 2, trois avatars de la reprise apparaissent : la reprise musicale (cover), la reprise métaphorique (recover) et la reprise critique (uncover).
Ces trois motifs s’enchevêtrent pour donner à la série une tonalité idiosyncratique, mélange de lenteur, de compassion et d’indignation, une « note Treme» qui trouve son origine dans
le recours généralisé à la figure de la reprise. En mettant la reprise au cœur de sa facture, autant au niveau de la diégèse que de la métadiégèse, Treme ne cesse d’interroger les rapports complexes entre le pouvoir, la culture et la résilience des gens de peu.

The character of Creighton Bernette on the HBO series Treme, in his excesses and abjection, embodies post-Katrina New Orleans in crucial ways: physical and emotional excesses become ways to distance his character from viewers, in ways analogous to the othering of the city and its inhabitants in post-Katrina media and public discourses.

Il contributo intende proporre alcune riflessioni sulla rappresentazione degli effetti dell’uragano Katrina sulla città di New Orleans e sui suoi abitanti nel documentario When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts diretto da Spike Lee e trasmesso da HBO (2006) e nella serie Treme creata da David Simon con Eric Overmyer e trasmessa dalla medesima emittente (2010-2013). In particolare ci si soffermerà sulle rappresentazioni del rapporto tra evento traumatico-città-abitanti e sulle modalità di spazializzazione del trauma e formalizzazione dello spazio urbano e dei luoghi. In essi infatti emerge tutta la specificità dell’evento Katrina e della complessa stratificazione del trauma che implica. Un trauma collettivo che tiene insieme dimensioni culturali ma anche pienamente psicologiche individuali, che è insieme trauma politico, ambientale e urbano. Entrambi i testi si collocano come attori dei processi, anche politici, di significazione e risignificazione dell’evento traumatico, rappresentando il passaggio dal trauma al patrimonio traumatico e instaurando un legame con la città che va oltre gli aspetti scenografici agendo attivamente sui processi di ricostruzione. I testi evidenziano come sia nel tessuto cittadino di New Orleans, nella trama urbana e nella specificità della sua storia, che si possono leggere effetti e cause insieme del trauma e contemporaneamente da li ripartire per una rielaborazione e costruzione di nuove memorie condivise.

, SEVEN MONTHS AFTER hurricane Katrina enveloped the coast of Louisiana submerging 80 percent of New Orleans under water, 2 I travelled with a group of young adults from my church in North Carolina on a mission-relief trip to join in on the recovery efforts. Partnering with a local urban ministry, we descended upon the Central City district, working by day in one of the surrounding communities most affected by the floodwaters. Our church team was one of thousands of such groups to converge upon the city in the wake of the storm to assist in the process of cleaning up and rebuilding. Even seven months afterward, most of the city was still in shambles. When the levees broke, the ensuing flood killed over 1,800 people, wreaking $108 billion in damage and displacing hundreds of thousands of residents. 3 Driving through, I remember block upon block of vacant houses, a black high-water stain nearly touching the roof still evident across their façades. Spray-painted letters and symbols were scrawled on the front of the homes, the remnants of the National Guard's sweep of the neighborhood checking for bodies and pets in the weeks following the hurricane. It was a somber and hauntingly empty place; too still, too deserted. Amid such devastation, our team was tasked with pulling everything out of the houses and gutting them completely, as the first stage of clean up and restoration post-disaster. The desolation of these previously lively neighborhoods is hard to illustrate, and working within these homes was quite disorienting. We were not just removing waterlogged, rotten, and moldy dry wall, but

Audience studies and production studies have had largely separate trajectories in research, despite their shared grounded theory agendas and research methods. Drawing on a larger ethnography of media audiences and producers, this article shows how the human subjects of audience studies and production studies might be studied together to reveal the power relations involved in mass media production processes. In this particular case study, fans and extras for the television series Treme (2010–2013) shared a discourse around the place of viewing and making which strove to articulate a common culture despite the real hierarchical barriers between audiences and production personnel.

À partir de l’exemple des génériques des séries télévisées Treme [David Simon, HBO, 2010¬—2013] et Homeland [Gideon Raff, Showtime, 2011—], l’article interroge la fonction détachable du générique, pour se demander comment celui-ci, par l’emploi renouvelé d’images d’archives d’information, peut générer un écart vis-à-vis de la fiction qu’il introduit – écart qui peut être formel, mais aussi idéologique. Le resaisissement des images d’archives met en place un devenir artistique de l’information, qui fait alors du générique un palimpseste télévisuel, et permet la convergence de problématiques historiques, narratologiques et esthétiques.